


Cure Infini: Hugtto Precure and Illustrating the Way Forward for Magical Boys

by penitence_road



Category: HuGっと！プリキュア | Hug tto! Precure
Genre: Gen, Gender Roles, Magical Boys, Magical Girl Themes, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:28:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29121945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penitence_road/pseuds/penitence_road
Summary: Being a mini-essay about Wakamiya Henri, his relationship with femininity, and how his presentation allows him to become the most authentic "magical boy" the magical girl genre has ever seen.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Cure Infini: Hugtto Precure and Illustrating the Way Forward for Magical Boys

Back when Episode 42 of _Hugtto! PreCure_ dropped, it predictably stirred up quite a lot of talk, even news articles, about Henri as the first official boy Cure in the fifteen-year magical girl franchise—his predecessors and how much they qualified or didn’t, as well as Henri himself and whether he counted or didn’t. One thing I never saw much talk about, however, was the narrative statement being made in Henri becoming Cure Infini. On the surface, it’s simple enough: anyone can be a Cure, even boys. There’s a deeper reason, though, why Henri _specifically_ is the first male Cure, why he “counts” in ways those who came before him did not. He has a proper and official Cure name, of course, and he has a real magical transformation; those are both important bars to clear. The most important thing, though, is that that boy spends enormous portions of his screen-time enthusiastically embracing “feminine” gender expression and—crucially!—he never, ever treats it like a joke. 

A number of people, upon seeing Henri’s episode as Cure Infini, complained that it didn’t count for two reasons. First, that it was a one-off thing—that it wasn’t replicable, that he wouldn’t join the team going forward. Setting aside the fact that Henri does get one more outing in the costume in the finale, this is all true. He doesn’t gain a transformation device that would let him unlock his Cure form freely; he doesn’t become a core Cure. All of these things are also true, however, of _Maho Girls PreCure_ ’s Mofurun, who gains a movie-only Cure form. _Kirakira PreCure ala Mode_ ’s Pekorin gains Cure powers only during the finale. During the _Splash Star_ finale, Michiru and Kaoru gain the powers of Cure Bright and Cure Windy—and they even have S.H. Figuarts toys! Consider also: literally everything about Cure Echo.Yet no one says any of these characters don’t “count” just because they aren’t core characters—every one of them has a legit claim to a Cure mantle, even if it was only for a limited time or in restricted circumstances.

Other than the duration argument, the other prominent element people bandied about for why Henri didn’t count was that he didn’t have any attacks, named or otherwise. In a franchise famous for its magical melees and gorgeous canned animation sequences, he didn’t attack anyone, so he doesn’t qualify to be a Cure. This, of course, overlooks characters like Shiny Luminous, from the very first iteration of the franchise, whose powers are resolutely nonviolent; likewise, the long chain of barrier maidens, the legendary witches of _Maho Girls,_ and the fanciful magical patisseries of _Kirakira_ are all far below the average punching-and-kicking quotient for the franchise. Cure Infini contributes to his fight just fine; he dazzles the monster with his own charisma (just like Cure Heart does in the _Spring Carnival_ movie) and then he clears up the choking aura of despair in the rink by displaying his core gimmick in precisely the same non-named, non-canned fashion that Cure Yell does all the time in the same show. 

Just defending his chops as a Support-style character misses the point, however. Henri counts as a Cure not because he meets some arbitrary number of qualifiers and common threads by the standards of the lore—he counts because of the way he affirms one of the most core precepts of the magical girl genre: that magical girls embrace traditionally feminine qualities and in that embrace, find power.1 Makeup, fashion, flowers, jewelry; in a grander sense, gentleness, kindness, love, compassion, hope—all of these are interests, personality traits, and values that are categorized as “girly” in a great deal of other media. Male characters are derided or sidelined for having such interests; believing that conflict can be resolved with love or forgiveness is seen as naïve at best, dangerously foolish at worst. Conflict is meant to be resolved with violence, with dominance, with military accouterment and enemy stats, with speeches about justice and the inherent value of getting _stronger_.

Magical girl shows can take the same huge, dangerous, world-threatening conflicts but, instead of telling the main characters that they must find legendary swords or learn to use physics-defying giant robots, it gives them legendary compacts and physics-defying magic lightshows. Instead of power armor, they get pretty dresses. Instead of bold machismo, they get effortless grace. These things are _codified in the lore_ as sources of power. Indeed, by my measure, any show that is too embarrassed of femininity to embrace girly magic items, ribbon-heavy costume changes and the power of love and forgiveness is not really engaging with the genre in good faith. This is why magical girl shows so seldom feature magical boys, and if they do, those boys are given a more masculine design ( _Sailor Moon, Shugo Chara_ ), or they’re played for comedy ( _Earth Defense Club, Magical Girl Ore_ )—because for a male character to truly embrace magical girl trappings, he would first have to embrace feminine traits. So, so few shows are willing to go there, though, because women behaving like men makes them Strong Female Characters, but men behaving like women makes them a joke. 

And thus we come back to Wakamiya Henri. 

From his very first appearance, Henri resists categorization. He’s mixed-race, but insists that the girls shouldn’t think of him as being half-Japanese and half-French, but rather, fully and simultaneously, both a Parisian (perceived in Japan as embodying the height of modern style) and a yamato nadeshiko (the personification of traditional Japanese femininity). His signature flower is a white lily, symbolizing purity and chastity, and strongly tied the image of a woman’s innocent beauty—to say nothing of the entire [genre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_\(genre\)#Yuri) named for it! However, his personality is the farthest thing from demure and humble. Henri is stubborn, disinclined to listen to others, and not naturally inclined to cooperation. He's something of a tease, flippant because it amuses him to be so, beautiful without being gentle. He and fellow skater Homare are independent, friendly rivals who push each other forward, not pair-skate partners who lift each other up.

His first episode establishes Henri as “the Prince of Skating,” but like categorization based on his nationality, Henri also cheerfully ignores traditional gender presentation. He uses “boku” pronouns rather than the more posturing “ore” of most boys his age; his voice is masculine, but his speaking cadence is light and playful without crossing the line into shrill parody. When he’s visiting Harry’s storefront and trying on clothes, he emerges from the dressing room in a long white dress, blithely responding to Harry’s confused observation of, “That’s ladies’ wear,” with, “As long as it suits me, that’s all that matters, right?” Main character Hana agrees, enthusing that he looks like a goddess, to which Henri cheekily smiles and says he gets that a lot. Prince and Goddess, he accepts both designations with equal pride.

In a much more blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line, he’s also established as being concerned about _time_ —I’ll touch on that briefly later.

In his second major outing, Henri is confronted with the strict gender essentialism of Aisaki Masato. They clash first over tweaks Henri’s made to his school uniform that make it noticeably more feminine, and later over Henri’s proud donning of yet another white dress, this one specifically tailored for him to wear for a fashion shoot. He meets Masato’s scorn with pointed dismissal, and his pain with even-handed sympathy, but in both cases, Henri is adamant that the way he dresses is not something that’s up for debate. He does not care what other people think about his self-expression, he feels it’s a waste of time to even try to explain it to people who clearly don’t _want_ to understand, and he patently refuses to change himself just to make other people more comfortable with who he is. The most comforting words he has for the monsterized Masato boil down to, “Instead of focusing on me, why don’t you try to love who _you_ are a little more?”2

This episode also plays with male and female gender roles in a broader sense with its invocation of “hero” and “princess.” The English loanwords “hero” and “heroine” in Japan are very gendered terms, not simply on the surface of them, but in the connotations they carry. Heroes are active characters with agency, the protagonists of their own stories, whereas heroines are characters who serve as motivation (or, less kindly, trophies) for the heroes. There’s a sense of damsel to the term “heroine.” You can read more about this [here](https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2019-01-21/sword-art-online-author-reki-kawahara-says-female-characters-should-not-be-treated-as-trophies/.142337), but Masato also spells it out plainly: girls can’t be heroes; they’re supposed to just let themselves be protected. Calling a girl a hero is just using words wrong! Henri and Hana both cheerfully refute this notion, even trading jokes about it. Hana, as Cure Yell, is a hero come to rescue Henri, who by virtue of needing to be saved must be a princess. Girls can be heroes, yes, and boys can be princesses.3 You can do anything; you can be anything.

The rest of his arc up to becoming Cure Infini pushes this even farther, returning to Henri’s early warnings about his and Homare’s limited time as pro athletes and adding the additional layer that Henri is afraid of the future because of the way his own maturation is beginning to affect his consciously “gender-transcending” presentation. The scene of him clutching his own throat while he laments the way his voice is changing will surely be painfully familiar to anyone who’s struggled with gender dysphoria. It’s excellent material, and I don’t feel the need to reiterate it for my current purposes. 

What it comes down to is this—Henri is a boy, but he is a boy who enthusiastically and vocally embraces feminine self-expression. He’s perfectly happy to take Precure powers as they come—in the same way that he says he won’t change who he is to make anyone more comfortable in their ignorance, neither does he require that the magic of Precure change its manifestation to make him more comfortable in some binary notion of “masculinity.” Henri is a magical boy in a magical girl world precisely _because_ he, like generations of magical girls before him, is able to draw strength and confidence from feminine signifiers—and therefore, in a setting in which those signifiers carry true, real magic, he too is able to tap into that magic.

Cure Infini is, to my eye, the single best magical boy that the genre has ever produced. I truly believe that Henri deserves to be seen as a game-changer, and I would encourage any creator thinking about including transforming boys in their magical girl story to give his arc a look. He represents as genuine and wholehearted an embrace of magical girl themes as I have seen in a very long time, and I dearly hope we'll see more like him in the years to come. 

###### FOOTNOTES

1 There is, of course, a wholly different discussion to be had about whether or not pushing girls towards things like make-up and fashion is desirable. Yet somehow, I never see handwringing about whether telling young boys they can solve all their real-life problems with swords, expensive cars, and fistfights is appropriate.[return]

2 Already struggling with his relationship with his sister falling apart due to their clashes over her “unfeminine” interests, Masato and his arc find a major turning point in Henri’s compassion.[return]

3 Not that the franchise thinks that [princesses](https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/46929) have to just sit back and be rescued either, mind.)[return]

**Author's Note:**

> Written rather some time ago for the "Normalizes Trans* Lives" square of Banned Together Bingo. I can't, in the end, really give _Hugtto PreCure_ in its entirety the full-throated recommendation that I wish I could, but regardless of my feelings on its ending, it really does have a lot of franchise-high individual elements, and Cure Infini is right up near the top of that list.


End file.
